Telecommunications & Media

U.S. Pentagon drops OCX GPS ground control programme after 16 years

The U.S. Defense Department has formally halted OCX, a next-generation ground control system for the U.S. military’s GPS satellite network, after years of technical problems and cost and schedule overruns. The programme, awarded in 2010 to Raytheon, now RTX, was initially expected to cost $3.7 billion and finish in 2016, but government spending rose to about $6.27 billion and total completion was estimated near $8 billion. The U.S. Space Force will instead upgrade the existing GPS control system.

Industry

Chinese researchers develop 1,000 times faster process for wafer-scale 2D semiconductors

Chinese researchers have developed a process to grow wafer-scale two-dimensional semiconductors at about 1,000 times the previous speed, a report said. The team redesigned a chemical vapor deposition process and replaced a solid substrate with a liquid gold and tungsten bilayer to ease physical limits on growth speed. They produced a monolayer tungsten silicon nitride film and said the work suggests scalable manufacturing potential, though mass production, defects and cost remain obstacles.